Recent posts by mjgold on Kongregate

“There’s no reason that impossible badges have to involve skill, and there’s no reason that they shouldn’t. They’re just there.”

I don’t quite get the view that impossible badges are fine if luck-driven or actually virtually impossible. If Kongregate is here to have fun playing games, then I’d hope the badges support that by setting fun, challenging goals.

Is repeating a random task hoping for a low-probability win fun? Personally, not for me, and I’d guess that’s true for the majority of badge-hunters. I think Kong has done a good job with the goals set for most badges and I recommend the hardest badges be reserved for the highest degrees of skill and/or endurance. Otherwise, for people like me who’d like to get all the badges, it’s pretty frustrating.

To me, an impossible badge should signify the highest degree of skill and be fun to shoot for. Even though I haven’t gotten the impossible badges in Streamline, Desktop Tower Defense, or Hexiom (and might never), I think these are great badges because they’re fun games and achievable with practice.

The current Pandemic 2 impossible badge is a small amount of strategy and a TON of luck and restarts. Why promote hours of restarts because of Pandemic’s poor infection algorithms? It’s pretty much a lottery every five minutes; we had a dozen people spend 5+ hours on it last night to no avail.

I’m okay with some measure of luck and endurance in badges – for example, Dino Run – but Pandemic 2 has too many flaws and requires too much luck. Here’s a vote for future impossible badges to be more skill-based and fun.

Thanks,

Mark

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To below replies:

I don’t think people are opposed to badges being hard or taking time; it’s badges that are mainly luck. If you think it’s fun to wait for the 1 in 500 chance when the win condition happens, then we have different definitions of fun and what impossible badges should be.

If you think Pandemic 2 isn’t luck-based, I respectfully disagree. We’ve had a lot of sharp players studying the game for days and even with optimal strategies, winning comes down to things out of the player’s control: boat generation, the order of countries being infected, random death rates. Why is that fun?

(I do like the Hard badge of winning in relaxed mode. That’s definitely achievable in a reasonable amount of time.)

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